politics

Utopia is on its way!

Utopia, a project that will connect homes and businesses in 11 cities in Utah with fiber, has just taken a major step forward.

Today, organizers announced that they have secured $85 million in bond financing to start the first phase of the project. Phase I, which begins in August, will include the build-out of fiber in six cities. Phase II, which will require additional financing, will include homes and business not completed in the first part of construction along with customers in the remaining five cities.

People have been watching Utopia closely, since it is one of the biggest fiber-to-the-premise … Read more

Building the new railroad

Roseville, Calif. is an unlikely place to view the merits of fiber-to-the-home deployment. My brief visit there showed a region marked with its former glory as a turn-of-the-century railroad town. Maybe the city's history represents a metaphor for the transformation of its long-staid Roseville Telephone Company, renamed SureWest Communications in 2001, into the builders of the modern railroad.

Who knows if SureWest's fiber gambit will pay off. At a price of $12 million, the investment was a steal. And just like what Baby Bell Verizon believes will become the leading edge of communications infrastructure, the slow roll-out of … Read more

Broadband slugfest

I've been hearing a lot about the mudslinging between polar-opposite loudmouths Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore. Today, I got to see what the fuss was all about.

Thanks, Fox News, for letting me re-live the fireworks.

Since I was playing softball last night (my team is appropriately named The Muckrakers), I missed Moore's surprise appearance on the O'Reilly Factor. The story goes that O'Reilly jumped out of his car when he spotted Moore walking down a Boston street and landed the controversial filmmaker as a guest on his show. So I went to Fox News' … Read more

Feds give $9 million for rural broadband

Bush's Agriculture Department is releasing another $9 million in grants for rural broadband projects. This is part of a Farm Bill project that passed a few years ago, and the program is now in its third year. The administration is suddenly casting the project as part of Bush's overall broadband vision -- but more power to him for supporting the project (although technically Congress has required a broadband component to rural development since 1995). Rural areas desperately need more network access.

Another thing the administration could do is support municipalities building their own networks.

Bushies say broadband is doing great

Presidential advisors convened a reporter's round table in Washington today to point out that the administration is doing just peachy in its goal of getting broadband to the masses. Broadband subscriber numbers are growing faster than color TVs or VCRs at a similar point after their introductions, said Phil Bond, undersecretary of commerce for technology.

That??s campaign talk. It's a stretch to say that Bush has anything to do with this, and ?? to be fair ?? he'd probably agree. His strategy is to get out of the way of the market, and so essentially he's saying … Read more

Or maybe DSL is doing just fine, thanks?

Slice the numbers how you like, folks. TheStreet.com says DSL gains are slowing. The IHT today says DSL subscriptions are speeding up compared to cable. Maybe this is one of those expectations things. After a long time lagging miserably, DSL started booming, and now is falling back slightly to where it should have been all along, if the big phone companies hadn't been slow off the mark.

But stay tuned for when all the quarterly numbers come in. And keep your eyes on advanced projects, like Comcast's 6mbps and Verizon's Fios fiber optics. I want 30mbps … Read more

Korea also the top source for phishers

Jim R. points out that South Korea's broadband boom comes with a price ?? it's also the world capital for phishing, or emails that pretend to be legitimate while trying to steal personal information. According to a new study reported by MSNBC, 20 percent of these con-mails are hosted by sites in Korea.

Getting the Latino vote

An interesting study came out today. Latinos in the U.S. prefer DSL over cable by a 3-to-1 margin, according to market research firm Horowitz Associates.

Why Latinos prefer DSL wasn't answered in this study. But this is the first study on broadband and ethnicity that I've stumbled upon since I started covering the industry more than a year ago.

This study interested me because big media companies have steadily changed their entertainment investments towards ethnic groups. Who would've thought a movie about a Korean and an Indian stoner looking for a munchie fix in the badlands … Read more

Where's this roller coaster going?

Here's my issue with Time Warner: How the heck to you judge whether it's broadband businesses are on the right track?

First there's Time Warner Cable, which runs a broadband ISP called Road Runner. The service added 127,000 new customers last quarter for a total of 3.5 million. That still makes Road Runner the second largest cable broadband ISP after Comcast. But take a closer look. Last quarter's gains were less than the 170,00 added during Q2 last year and the 193,000 added during the previous quarter.

Then there's AOL. The … Read more

Broadband utopia in Korea

It's always dangerous to look at a snapshot of history and draw conclusions, but it sure looks today like South Korea is doing something right on broadband. With a mix of government spending, pro-competition regulatory policies, and an intense public focus on why broadband is important to the country, Korea has left the U.S. in the dust. More than seventy percent of Internet households there have broadband, making dial-up a relative rarity, and when they say broadband they're more likely to mean 8 mpbs to 20 mbps than our paltry DSL or cable speeds.

Of course, there … Read more